Design for Politics & Good Governance: Electoral process and Design for India

Use of Design for Good national and Regional Democracy

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

Image 1: Jaagore.com website with an aim to register one billion new voters as part of the Indian democracy.

A new campaign has hit the regular TV programmes calling for an awakening of our youth towards the need to vote and be involved in the political process of the Local region, State and the Nation. The advertisment campaign is quite effective and I was curious to check what it held out as a promise for the youth to participate in individually and as a group. I have had my own problems with the electoral process since in the last General Elections I was unable to vote since my name was messed up in the electoral rolls and my ID card too had defects and worst of all my polling booth just could not be located all through the day in spite of trying several locations in our voting area.

Image 2: Jaago re TV Commercial from the YouTube offer.

I had tried to get my name corrected in a subsequent round of verification and I had visited a couple of schools to get my voter identity card reissued with a hope that the data would come out correctly but this too seems to have failed due to the clumsy manner in which the data collection was organized and I was on the lookout for another opportunity to correct this mistake.

Image 3: Map interface that is offered to locate ones house and from it ones constituency for the registration process.

This gave me the incentive to respond to the advertisment that appreaded on TV calling for new voter registrations which was launched in the public interest by Tata Tea Ltd and an NGO based in Bengaluru called Jaanagraha, and we were directed to a website called Jaagore.com, where the word Jaago means to wake up, a wake up call for all voters. The website proclaims a lofty ambition of registering one billion voters across 35 cities in India and so far at last look they had succeeded in getting all of 220839 people registered when I last checked the site. What I saw was encouraging. Someone had taken the initiative to use the web to reach out and build a system that could be of public good. However as I went further into the site I realized that while it was a technical success at the design level much still needed to be done if they were to reach their stated objective.

Image 4: FAQ about the voting process at the Jaago Re website.

I had talked about Jaanagraha, the Bengaluru based NGO in my London debate about the next Design City and they were here involved in another venture for public good but I missed the use of design that I had advocated which could make this effort both effective as well as be a great experience for the user. What I miss the most is the language tools that could enable non English speaking citizens to participate in this initiative and the site itself could use many layers of design engagement which could make it an offering that could stand the test of variety and complexity which this current offering fails to provide. Not that this cannot be done. The web is very forgiving and flexible and at any stage the organizers can give their audience an improved interface and a much better feel and performance if they used design along the way. However I still give this a thumbs up for the initiative and wish it all the very best in the days ahead and hope that design finds a way into this initiative somewhere along the way of success.

Image 5: Electronic Voting Machine – story of its design in 1988 at NID for the Election Commission of India.

This reminded me of the Electronic Voting Machine that was designed by the National Institute of Design for the National Election Commission way back in 1988. It was the preliminary user testing that helped embed many intangible features into the interface at that time when perhaps for the first time cardboard models of the voting machine were taken into the field by the design team to conduct semiotic tests of issues of usability, particularly with illiterate users, and this is what I believe has made this particular design survive the test of time and it is still functional and effective It took ten long years to introduce it into 10 percent of the elections and another long period to reach the 100 percent mark and be used in all assembly and parliamentary elections across India. Design is a sensitive process and not just an object that emerges at the end of that process nor is it the effect of technology alone since there are so many human and other factors that need to be taken into consideration which makes it a truly wicked problem, but one that can be tamed with imagination and sustained design action.

I do wish that the Jaagore web effort would follow this process through a number of iterations and reach the success that it deserves through the use of sensitive design thought and action in India. The people of India deserve this kind of attention and care. Design is indeed politics. Unlike the politics of opposition and negotiation that is practiced through the party politics of our times it is the the politics of proposition, consensus and conviction building that can be adopted by the leadership of the community. This is the message that I had conveyed in my London presentation at the Design Cities debate where Bengaluru was voted as the most likely candidate for the future title, if we get it right in the days ahead.

Prof M P Ranjan’s Papers

WebInnovation2007: Web 2.0 Conference at Bangalore

A well-attended two-day conference at the Ashoka Grand in Bangalore with 750 professionals from the Information Technology sector included engineers, marketing executives and designers, all eager to understand and appreciate the various dimensions of the emerging Web 2.0 paradigm. Rupesh Vyas and I made a presentation that explored many opportunities for Web 2.0 applications that we see in India and in our presentation we focused on grassroots level explorations that had been initiated in our classroom projects at the NID and those that could be taken forward with real impact to a huge user base across India. The presentation titled “User Driven Web 2.0: Design Opportunities for India” defined design as we now understand it, an activity where human intentions mediated with thoughts and actions are used to produce value, great value.

Image: Study of Sahpur is offered as an opportunity for the use of Web 2.0 approaches to connect villagers in the Indian sub-continent to map local resources and aspirations for development initiatives across India.
The whole morning session was dominated by discussions on how the business sectors dealing with Web 2.0 could indeed generate revenue streams. It almost seemed that the speakers and the audience were obsessed with how anyone could create community and use this to create a monetized value for himself or herself. Little discussion on what could be done but much on how and how much, very disheartening indeed. The keynotes too kept returning to the concept of making money and the difficulty faced by web based companies in retaining their hard earned leadership in a highly competitive space. Perhaps the industry should try and focus on what can be done in India at the grassroots where it is needed the most and the value generated would create wealth for all of us across the country.

Image: Project INFARM done in 1995 as part of the Apple Design initiative is offered as an example of farmers as users of rich Web 2.0 applications in India.
In my presentation I talked of the Web 2.0 as being a new mind-set rather than a new technology, although many new technological as well as business processes can be listed as part of this new and emerging paradigm. However at the core it is for me about people working together on a spirit of sharing and this has less to do with many of the concerns of the industrial economy and even he knowledge economy as we have come to understand it today. We need a new attitude to understand the offerings that are springing up all around us in the form and shape of the Web 2.0 economy, or should we use another term to describe this phenomenon that is perplexing all of us who are trying to make sense of the emerging paradigm.

Image: The Heritage Walk in Ahmedabad as a opportunity for creative mapping of our cities by students using GeoVisualisation tools to create citizen generated content and rich local knowledge sharing that can create value for tourists as well as visitors to the city.
Thinking about the evolution of human ideas while sitting in the conference it did cross my mind that we have evolved from the hunter gatherer era when fire and tools gave humans an edge over other species on our planet. The settled agriculture era saw the rise of land holding as our currency and measure of wealth and this also spawned the zamindari attitudes and created the nobles and commoners. The smokestack industries were built on mined minerals and energy from fossil fuels. Land, minerals and finance formed the backbone of the economy till this was disrupted by the hi-tech industries that used knowledge and technology as the prime drivers of the economy. The emergence of the web and the internet opened a new space for creative disruption and the brick and mortar establishments had to give way to the dematerialized economy where finance flowed through electronic networks and crossed national borders at will. We have now arrived at another disruption and suddenly concentration of wealth of the previous eras is being challenged by individual content creators and a new paradigm is needed to explain the open source characteristics of Web 2.0 and I think that we will need a new mind set to understand what this has in store for all of us. Surely creative sharing will be the driver of the web 2.0 era that is almost on us as we blog and share and build new applications that can accommodate all of us and our needs like never before.

Image: Handmade in India as a database that could bring Indian craftsmen on to a Web 2.0 platform as part of the creative economy of the future.
The four case examples that we used in our presentation called for design action starting from a deep study of user needs and aspirations and the users included villagers, farmers, students and craftsmen across India, who are all unusual subjects for a Web 2.0 initiative. However we believe that it is do-able if we can put together multi-disciplinary teams that can work closely with each user group and help build prototypes and concepts that can be refined and delivered in each of the sectors in which action is required. These cases are only indicative of what kinds of opportunities that we see in India and the scale of what is possible is indeed staggering. The details of the WebInnovation2007 Conference is available at this web link above and our presentation titled User Driven Web 2.0: Design Opportunities for India is a PDF file which can be downloaded from this link as a 2.2 mb file. The abstract of the presentation is quoted below.

Abstract of Paper and Visual presentation to the Web Innovation Conference, Bangalore in December 2007

User Driven Web 2.0: Design Opportunities for India

Prof. M P Ranjan
Chairman, Geovisualisation Task Group, DST, Govt. of India
Faculty of Design
National Institute of Design

Rupesh Vyas
Faculty of Design
Coordinator Information Design Discipline
National Institute of Design

India lives in many centuries and the rapid strides of development are impacting the lives of all of us particularly those who live and work in the rural sectors of our economy. It is here that most of our people live and perhaps where we should be making an effort to impact through a concerted impetus of design to make to make the tools and processes accessible to the people who need it the most.

How do we achieve this when the tools and technology have been held and operated by educated and urban oriented individuals and institutions for all these years? This is perhaps where design imagination and technological commitment can create new avenues for the application of these innovative tools and techniques in a democratic and ubiquitous manner all over our land. Is this a just in theory and like a distant dream or can or become a reality? Can we demonstrate this possibility in a few significant case studies so that it evokes a sense of commitment across the country to use these now widely available resources particularly in an IT enabled manner?

Can the emerging understanding of what is Web 2.0 create a platform of collaborators across disciplines to achieve what many institutions and Governments cannot do on their own? We believe that the time is right to take the technologies to the people and that we operate it in a bottom up approach with imagination and commitment to achieve what needs to be done. Do we know what is needed? Perhaps even here we will once again go to the bottom of the value chain and use the tools of co-creation to work our way back to new and exciting offerings that can transform our national, regional and local economies, one step at a time.

In this paper we will show that many new applications are indeed possible and these would cover the hitherto ignored areas of application in a participatory manner. This should make it both usable and relevant to the local conditions and meet the aspirations of the people whom it is to serve. Some suggestions have been made using examples of classroom and research projects conducted by the students and faculty of the National Institute of Design to show how these tools and knowledge domains in the area of Web based communication and exchange can be applied to new and interesting applications. This would establish that we can reach far into our rural hinterland and show that these could become a mission that would be achieved through active user participation to address local needs and aspirations in a variety of critical areas of application.

These could be called design opportunities since the intention is to add value to the local situation through making the information and knowledge both usable as well as accessible to the users in their own domains is a starting point for the design journey. With partners from technology and the user base much can be achieved which was hitherto not attempted. This is an invitation to imagination of what could be and not what is; do join us in this journey.

First National Conference on Geovisualisation: Welcome Address by Prof. M P Ranjan

Image: Screenshot of village study done by NID students as part of the Data Visualisation course to explore applications for geovisualisationWelcome Address delivered to the 1st National Conference on GeoVisualisation held at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad on 28th to 30th November 2007. This was co-sponsored by The NRDMS (DST) Government of India, New Delhi and the NID, Ahmedbad.

Prof. M P Ranjan
Chairman, Geovisualisation Task Group
and
Faculty of Design, National Institute of Design

Welcome to NID and this is a good time to raise some questions as well as to try and provide some answers.

I have four key questions and a host of associated answers. So let me begin with my Welcome address by addressing these one by one.

1. Why GeoVisualisation? What is it anyway?
What are the Issues and opportunities? What are the domains of application? In my personal agenda is another big question, which is, how do we make complex data dealing with geographic spatial implications visible and usable to the ordinary citizen in India.

We stand on a great tradition of cartography in India. A few years ago NID was requested by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India to work with the Office of the Survey of India to develop an exhibition to celebrate the Great Arc project which was the first ever mapping of a part of the globe and this had happened in India some 200 years ago. Since then India has been at the forefront of cartographic traditions and now it is time to take leadership again through excellence in Geovisualisation. In this we would be happy to partner with the NRDMS-DST who have sponsored this event as well as reflect on the work done in Ahmedabad by ISRO and many other organizations that has set a platform for this new field of Geovisualisation to take root in India with a strong partnership between Design and science and technology initiatives.

2. Why Design?
Design is now being defined as a much broader field that takes intentions to the creation of value to society and ecology through a process of thoughts and actions. Design deals with products and applications and it has a user focus while the dominant ideology is having a technology focus especially in the fields of application that we are dealing with in the areas of geovisualisation.
Through design we intend to address the needs of many sectors including education, development, planning, management and most critical of all in the induction of innovation into this sector and all the potential applications so that we can unfold huge value in the process of both creation as well as delivery.

3. Why this Conference?
The geovisualisation agenda can only be addressed by adopting a multi-disciplinary context as a given condition for moving forward since so many disparate skill sets would need to be integrated and this is an attempt to bring all these skill sets to a common platform to address our complex needs and opportunities. This is also an attempt to bring together the multiple knowledge domains of geography, cartography, computation, visualization and design in the service of real challenges that call for the use of geospatial data and representation for the core tasks of local planning as well as in decision support systems in a number of domains of application. We also need to build awareness, commitment and the linkages that are necessary to make the whole operation to be useful to the people at large in many parts of the country as well as in many walks of life and at many levels, local and national.

4. Why at NID?
The Institutional objectives of NID has taken us down a path of discovery and in recent years NID has set up a number of new initiatives that deal with technology design fusion that has culminated in the setting up of new programmes and disciplines and the setting up of two new campuses in Gandhinagar and at Bangalore. Both these initiatives are to supplement the work that has been done over the years at the Paldi campus dealing with promoting design as a core ability in a huge number of sectors of our economy, in my estimate, about 230 sectors that are in critical need of that discipline. NID has proposed the setting up of a Centre for Geovisualisation to provide a platform for research and design explorations in the various sectors of application of geovisualisation which would need a strong interface with the already developed areas of science and technology with particular emphasis in making these applications user friendly by addressing opportunities in usability and accessibility by those who need it the most. We hope to use this conference to help build the agenda for research and education to be conducted by the proposed centre and I would call on the participants to provide directions and suggestions for the NID team to take forward in the days ahead. We are also interested in showing through our interest and actions that the various investments in science, technology and management need to be supplemented by investments and the use of design in this very critical new field and that this would influence other such initiatives for partnership across disciplines in the days ahead.

Welcome to NID and to Ahmedabad. I would, like to take this opportunity to welcome all the speakers and delegates, students and experts to NID as well as to compliment the NID and DST teams that have done the background work to make this happen. I would particularly mention Dr Bibuda Baral and Rupesh Vyas of NID and Dr D Dutta of NRDMS, DST, Government of India and to their teams for their sustained efforts to help realize this event. I would also take this opportunity to thank the Geovisualisation Task Force team as the Chairman of the Committee for their active support in leading the deliberations that have culminated in the launch of the first National Conference on Geovisualisation and for setting in motion a chain of events that will be of huge significance in the years ahead. I will be speaking later on the theme of usability and in my presentation I will share my views on areas of application and on the design opportunities that I see for the read ahead in the field of Geovisualisation in India.

Theme Lecture at USID2007, Hyderabad

Delivering the Keynote address at the USID2007 on 18 June 2007, I focused on the theme of the conference, “Living in a Digital World: Opportunities for Engineers & Designers”, and my travel to the “CyberCity” gave me several insights about the IT industry in Hyderabad as well as the status of recent developments in the city. My presentation to the conference gave an overview of our current understanding of design from the NID perspective and focused on the emerging opportunities in the field of digital design and it touched on the new policy initiatives that promise to finally bring support to the design sector in the country, long delayed, but much needed nevertheless. The conference was well attended with over 150 participants from the Indian IT sector, international players as well as the Indian media.

Hyderabad has changed since I last saw it, and this is quite dramatic since the conference at the Hi-Tech city’s Novotel Hotel conference centre could have been anywhere in the developed world, going by the quality of facilities but when you head back to the old city, real India strikes back with its traffic jams and its multi-layered cultural and chaotic infrastructure and road sense – cows, dogs and humans all using the same road, competing with the cars, rickshaws, trucks and busses – and people all over the place, yes we are in real India again. The approach road, a three-lane highway almost completed but not quite, is lined by the leading IT companies of India and many of the worlds largest IT corporations or their respective research centres. A month ago in Bangalore, another exploding IT destination for India, I saw similar sights along the Outer Ring Road also lined with Indias’ best and many many from the world stage, and I wondered about where all this explosive growth was taking us, traffic and all. Missing are all the great big boulders that had lined the landscape in my imagination and memory of Banjara Hills and the Jubilee Hills area through which we traveled, to make way for the new roads and IT campuses, I miss these spectacular landmarks, perhaps we could do all this development in another way?

My presentation called for the use of design across all the 230 sectors of our economy and for IT and Digital design initiatives across five broad fields of exploration and design action. Opportunities for design action were described across these five major areas of focus, namely, Nature, Life, Work, Health & Play. Nature includes all needs of the Earth and its Environment and in the age of Global Warming we need to apply our minds to addressing design action in this field. GeoVisualisation, endangered species watch as well as the health of our planet using research and informed design action are some of the opportunities that I identified here. Life and community, society and culture are another avenue for channeling design energies and imagination and these could be the key source for future human harmony and community satisfaction. Work, on the other hand for me, represents meaningful and satisfying occupations and productivity as well as sustainable services and supports for the business community. Health come next with a focus on good food & fitness regimes that could ensure a quality of life that many of us lack, particularly in the developing world today. Elimination hunger and providing food and clean drinking water for all humans is not a difficult task to achieve if we set our minds and actions to achieve these results. Finally, in Play I see relaxation and sports, leisure activities and entertainment, all of which needs to be designed to meet the stressful lives of our times as well as the needs of our youth, children as well as our elderly and differently-abled citizens.

The challenges for Indian design are many and we will need to work overtime to make up for lost time due to poor policy frameworks and a lack of thrust in the past. The national Design Policy too will need to be refurbished to meet these enormous challenges to make any significant breakthroughs in the 230 sectors of our economy that we would need to make design action happen in India. These include all the Government sectors and Ministries as well as all our Industry sectors, all of which need design at many levels of intervention, and many of them still do not know that they do. Design for the social and public sectors too need special attention and it may well be a call for the establishment of a Ministry of Design in order to coordinate the design investments that are needed across the board in all the sectors of need and action in the days ahead. The mind-set to be nourished in my view would be to ask our engineers and designers to think of creative products and systems that are simultaneously sustainable and provide a great experience to the Indian public and the consumer, the Indian stakeholder at large. Design is a way forward, and at the broadest level of definition it can take good intentions through creative thoughts and skillful actions to generate huge value for everyone. Design is being re-invented, and around the world many design thinkers are recognizing this powerful role and it is this kind of macro-micro interpretation that should inform our national Design Policy going forward.

My presentation can be downloaded from my website at the design theory link and the conference details are seen at the USID2007 homepage link below. Comments in the media missed the case studies that were presented, the NID designed Electronic Voting Machine way back in 1988 which is now used in all elections across India, perhaps the worlds most significant and complex interface design experiment of the 80’s and the home composting system from Bangalore called the “Daily Dump”, which promises to revolutionize the collection and disposal of garbage, in a decentralized way, if it is supported and adopted by our society, only time will tell. Bucky Fuller’s “Space Ship Earth” is now for me even more delicate and it is the “Space Bubble Earth” with the soil layer forming the critical organic zone which will need to be protected at any cost, if we are to ensure the survival of the planet as we know it in a sustainable manner. Design creates – concepts, communications, products, systems and infrastructure – all using tools and processes created by technology, imbued with information and meaning in a intentional manner, transforming materials and form in a sustainable manner, which are driven by sensitivities and attitudes that are at an ethical level, well beyond the legal and the political, yes, “Design is an Intentional Activity that Generates Value”, for all stakeholders and the environment.